Additional Combat Changes for Update 35

virtus753

Troodon80 wrote: »

[*] Whoever did the parses at ZOS and said the DPS decrease "overall" would be between 6-11% wasn't truthful or had results presumably skewed by the changes to the raid dummy. Even comparing the inaccurate raid dummy it's still at minimum 11% and generally around 14% with tweaks to what we're using on Live (ignoring the restoration heavy attack 10 second parses we saw posted to Discord). Reducing boss, champion, and bannermen health by (broadly speaking) 10% still isn't enough to outweigh the discrepancy.
[/list]

They didn't say overall damage would be reduced by 6-11% full stop. They said overall damage would be reduced by 6-11% as a result of the changes to Light Attacks specifically. (That figure was given only in the "Light Attack Weaving" section, where the phrase "these changes" referred to the LA changes discussed there.) They gave no numbers whatsoever as to the damage reduction expected from nerfs to skills. Since they did give a figure for expected damage changes as a result of LA changes, they should also have given one for the additional changes to active and passive abilities and another to gauge overall dps loss to prevent this kind of misunderstanding and so we would have a much better gauge as to what to expect across the board.

Personally I'm down well over 20%, which makes the 10% boss hp reduction even more out of touch when their goal is to keep the "same level of challenge" as on live. It should be clear to anyone familiar with numbers that 10 != 11, 14, 20, or more. Part of the issue is that classes did not start with the same ceilings and did not get nerfed the same across the board, so we still have ceilings ranging from about 113-115k to 130k+. That's around a 15% discrepancy, which does not seem anywhere in the vicinity of balanced to me. (By contrast, races were within 6% of each other for dps when they overhauled them the other year, if I remember right.) It also makes it terribly difficult to balance the content, since the classes with higher ceilings will obviously find the content easier than ones with lower ceilings, and a class that got nerfed more heavily will obviously not find anywhere near the "same level of challenge" as on live compared to a class that didn't. But the blanket dungeon/trial-wide 10% figure suggests to me that the encounter team, who initially outright denied that any boss changes would be necessary, begrudged us that for now to try to keep some content possible. (From on a recent post from qcell, though, I gather they might not even have managed that.) This would have been a great opportunity for them to reduce more recent content by more while leaving the oldest content where it was at, thereby lowering the obscene delta between older and newer content, but instead we got a most facile stopgap. And that's not even considering the refusal to change arena boss health, for reasons that remain their own.

I'll also add it's not conspiracy theory territory to point out the fact that several massive changes to the trial dummy obfuscates parse comparisons between U34 and U35, making it a great deal of work to calculate the dps loss on what has become a widely adopted standard for parsing. They are quite clearly aware of how those dummies are used - that was the point in introducing them, after all, and they reiterated in the patch notes that these dummies are designed to represent raid situations. Whatever their exact reasons for making those changes now (when, e.g., the Torug's infused crusher value was over 2 years out of date), doing so has the effect of compounding the problematic optics of the update, since they are changing the standards by which players typically measure dps at the same time that they are drastically changing dps. That's also why a comment on the expected dps losses across the board, not just from LA changes, was only appropriate, and I would argue even necessary, for this patch. I hope, as I gather you do as well, that they set and manage player expectations much better going forward.

shadyjane62

Firstmep wrote: »

Anyone coming here to ask for additional changes, just turn back. We are 6 days out, that's it.
Any more changes will come in 3 months time.

Won't matter then.

Elsonso

Firstmep wrote: »

Anyone coming here to ask for additional changes, just turn back. We are 6 days out, that's it.
Any more changes will come in 3 months time.

Interestingly enough, this makes me wonder if they shortened the certification step to make a special last minute build.

Zormac

And what about the Noble Duelist set? It was changed when they were to implement non-scaling light and heavy attacks, but they didn't say anything about reverting the changes when they reenabled stat scaling.

Live:
(5 items) When you deal damage with a Light or Heavy Attack in melee range, you add 2681 Weapon and Spell Damage to your Light and Heavy Attacks for 5 seconds. This effect can occur once every 5 seconds.

PTS patch notes:
"This set now increases your damage done with Light and Heavy Attacks against monsters by 2110, rather than increasing their Weapon and Spell Damage scaling (since they don’t have any scaling)."

Rimskjegg

Elsonso wrote: »

Firstmep wrote: »

Anyone coming here to ask for additional changes, just turn back. We are 6 days out, that's it.
Any more changes will come in 3 months time.

Interestingly enough, this makes me wonder if they shortened the certification step to make a special last minute build.

Clearly Stadia certification hasn't prevented further changes so the option to simply delay all combat changes exists, it's simply a question of whether they want to or not.

@ZOS_GinaBruno
I really appreciate that medium weaving is canceled and Resto staff is not the new DD weapon for heavy attck builds. The problem right now isn't that the changes are bad anymore - it's that they are so rushed. Just as I predicted, there hasn't been enough time to balance light vs heavy attacks, with the new version of Empower which we won't get to see until live. Please look at @Lalothen 's numbers, they are NOT anecdotal, but they are theoretical because we can't actually test them! And untested changes simply are not ready to go live.

Not looking at duration passives is another example of the same rush. And nerfing all bosses by 10%, but (reportedly) leaving out portal DPS races? Come on. You're actually on the right track now, ZoS, you just need to slow down enough to get it right.

Revert all combat changes before live and try again in PTS for Update 36. We won't mind a sweeping change when it's actually good enough not to need "fixing" all over again in another 3 months.

Dagoth_Rac

The good news: RIP meta medium attack weaving builds.

The bad news: RIP non-meta channeled Heavy Attack builds.

K9002

Rimskjegg wrote: »

Clearly Stadia certification hasn't prevented further changes so the option to simply delay all combat changes exists, it's simply a question of whether they want to or not.

It's not so clear at all. These changes could have been made a week ago and we're only being informed now. The change to Empower was shared by Rich on some discord server a few days ago. If there was one thing ZOS submitted to Stadia, there might be multiple such changes that never made it to the PTS but were featured in the upcoming live build.

Necrotech_Master

K9002 wrote: »

Rimskjegg wrote: »

Clearly Stadia certification hasn't prevented further changes so the option to simply delay all combat changes exists, it's simply a question of whether they want to or not.

It's not so clear at all. These changes could have been made a week ago and we're only being informed now. The change to Empower was shared by Rich on some discord server a few days ago. If there was one thing ZOS submitted to Stadia, there might be multiple such changes that never made it to the PTS but were featured in the upcoming live build.

there is almost always changes between the last PTS build and live, majority of the time they are minor, but they are doing more major ones to really try to reel back what they have done with this update, but honestly they still havent done enough

KlauthWarthog

@ZOS_GinaBruno, is it possible to say if there will be balancing tweaks during u35, or if those will only start happening on u36 and forward?

Lalothen

Zormac wrote: »

And what about the Noble Duelist set? It was changed when they were to implement non-scaling light and heavy attacks, but they didn't say anything about reverting the changes when they reenabled stat scaling.

Live:
(5 items) When you deal damage with a Light or Heavy Attack in melee range, you add 2681 Weapon and Spell Damage to your Light and Heavy Attacks for 5 seconds. This effect can occur once every 5 seconds.

PTS patch notes:
"This set now increases your damage done with Light and Heavy Attacks against monsters by 2110, rather than increasing their Weapon and Spell Damage scaling (since they don’t have any scaling)."

Presumably this set will remain as it is on the PTS - which is a buff actually (and the 15s buff timer with 12s cooldown makes managing it far easier).

Troodon80

virtus753 wrote: »

They didn't say overall damage would be reduced by 6-11% full stop. They said overall damage would be reduced by 6-11% as a result of the changes to Light Attacks specifically.

That's part of my point. While accurate for that one very specific thing, it doesn't tell the whole story. If this patch had seen only 6-11% reduction to total overall DPS, most people probably wouldn't have cared, especially if the same reduction to health on bosses, et al, happened at the time.

virtus753 wrote: »

Personally I'm down well over 20%, which makes the 10% boss hp reduction even more out of touch when their goal is to keep the "same level of challenge" as on live.

I'm down around 12%-15% with changes to my build while using the 3m and 6m dummies so that data isn't skewed. I still think some of the bosses could have seen a 10% reduction to health even before the DPS changes in U35, and further reductions for the damage decrease for U35.

virtus753 wrote: »

I hope, as I gather you do as well, that they set and manage player expectations much better going forward.

I don't know about expectations, specifically, though it's certainly something which could be addressed. I hope that any additions for buffs/debuffs to the dummy happen on both Live and PTS at the same time so that data isn't skewed, possibly outside of a main PTS cycle, or add buffs/debuffs when there isn't a major DPS change happening in order to make the numbers not appear as bad as they really are; e.g. during a chapter release so that massive sweeping changes like U35 won't generally happen so as not to hamper chapter sales. They do themselves a disservice by being sneaky and adding buffs and debuffs to skew data between Live and PTS. Be better than that.

deejayvee

“Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.” - Aubrey de Grey

nwilliams2107b16_ESO

Oh well if this is the only changes we can expect next week, then for the first time since launch I’ll be using the “cancel sub” button, unless they have nerfed that too!

francesinhalover

Troodon80 wrote: »

I've said it before, but Update 35, even in its last week of PTS, is going to cause the end game scene to haemorrhage. I've spoken to a number of people from some of the highest end groups who are preparing to make the move to WoW or FFXIV. It's already hard for end game raiding groups to raid regularly. One group I joined a while back hasn't raided now for a couple months. Another stopped doing trifecta runs a few months ago as well, due to lack of available bodies to attend.

If the core idea of Update 35 is the raise end game to the ground and start over, then it's perfect. If you want a raiding community after the patch which is capable of clearing the newer trials' hard modes, then you need to address these trials and stop ignoring the feedback for specific content (especially the feedback given during their PTS cycles).

A few final notes:

• Taleria's damage on hard mode (Maelstrom, Wound, Matron's Frost Bolt, etc.) needs to be reduced by around 10% and health should be reduced to under 170M.
• Xalvakka's health on hard mode needs to be reduced to under 200M and increase the duration you have on each stage.
• Not enough has been done to address or mitigate the healing loss despite questions being asked fairly frequently, ZOS has seemingly focused more on the DPS side of the game as usual. We get it, HPS values is absurd. 80% of HPS in this game is counted as overheal. But most ground based heals are capped to 6 people, which means that someone (i.e. the tank) who should get heals might not; further made worse by the fact that you increased the gap in ticks for some heals while leaving others at 1 second, but from what I can see things like Ring of Preservation now no longer tick for under 1 second, though there are a few enemy sourced attacks which tick at intervals lower than 1 second. Please make all enemy sourced abilities tick a minimum frequency of 1 second.

To re-address some of my original commentary:

• Whoever did the parses at ZOS and said the DPS decrease "overall" would be between 6-11% wasn't truthful or had results presumably skewed by the changes to the raid dummy. Even comparing the inaccurate raid dummy it's still at minimum 11% and generally around 14% with tweaks to what we're using on Live (ignoring the restoration heavy attack 10 second parses we saw posted to Discord). Reducing boss, champion, and bannermen health by (broadly speaking) 10% still isn't enough to outweigh the discrepancy.
• The trial dummy shouldn't have been given the added buffs and debuffs going into a patch with fundamentally game-altering DPS changes as the difference in DPS has been skewed, which also had conspiracy theorists shouting from the rooftops that you were fully aware of how this would be perceived and you did it anyway (and then you added EC as well). Please learn from this.

I bet 80% of those players will come back.

Why did they play eso and not final fantasy? final fantasy released in 2010 after all.

Xarc

Please, when is U35 coming on live servers ?

anvilbert

I refuse to regear, respec and relearn all my characters again. This game is becoming a part time job just to keep up with the nerfing. I don't need nor want a part time job I just want to log in and have fun, and this ain't it.

Troodon80

francesinhalover wrote: »

I bet 80% of those players will come back.

How much are you willing to put on that bet? It may well be the case. Some peope I know who took a break 2+ years ago came back, but they play it considerably less seriously than they did before they took the break and haven't pushed to get back into end game. Point still stands. The changes only hurt end game raiding, as well as getting into end game raiding, it doesn't make it more accessible.

francesinhalover wrote: »

Why did they play eso and not final fantasy? final fantasy released in 2010 after all.

I would say for a great number of people in end game raiding, it's the combat. Something which will take a hit with U35. But there are many reasons, even down to aesthetics; some people just don't like the look of FFXIV.

Personally, I play both.

FluffWit

This is the patch notes for the week? 🤷‍♀️

Mudslinger

Hope this helps give a bit more visibility into what’s coming up. [/quote]

A years long laid out path of were Dev's are taking ESO would be more visibility

Adenoma

I’ll check in another three months from now. Thanks for the feedback. I feel like I keep tagging in on this game I used to love every three months.

yatish609

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

here's hoping 36 isn't like this catastrophe.

you, my friend, are on holy copium.

sorcmag01

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

In preparation for next week’s PC launch of Update 35, we wanted to let you know about a couple additional combat changes we are planning to make.

First, the Empower buff will no longer apply its bonus to partially charged Heavy Attacks. This change was made to prevent a situation where "medium attack weaving" could become a leading damage producing playstyle; these attacks are generally made by error rather than intentionally , as they are harder to do than a Light Attack or Fully-Charged Heavy Attack.

Additionally, we are reducing the damage from the final hit of restoration heavy attacks by approximately 27% and increasing the amount of Magicka restored by 10%. We’re taking out some of the raw power from this weapon type to prevent it from becoming a dominant damage producing weapon, and instead moving its focus of this attack type to be on the Recovery side of things.

Hope this helps give a bit more visibility into what’s coming up.

Thanks Gina for posting the changes on update 35.

Savagejack

Channeled abilities were changed to 0.8sec. Bound Armaments is currently at 1.2s channel time. I hope it wasn't missed.

master_vanargand

Players will be disappointed with ZoS if the additional changes are just that.
What are games? What is fun? Think again.

Zulera301

so in other words, you're taking the two highest performing aspects of the game after this disaster of a patch and nerfing them too?

Jesus Christ they really are trying to drive this game into the ground.

Alienoutlaw

Morrowind 2.0
i fear there is far more "hidden treasures" to come in the final U35 patch notes going live

Mayrael

Lol. All this feedback and ZOS come up with... This? Lol? What about:
- Mara's Balm?
- Rapid Regen being overnerfed vs Resolving Vigor being over buffed?
- Corrosive Armor still being godmode?
- Empower being now completely useless buff for PvP thus many skills and sets losing its meaning in PvP
- What about cast times on Teleport Strike and morphs?
- What about cast times on ultimates?
- What about healers being useless in PvE?
- What about not having any clear vision of what you (ZOS) want to do in near future?


Nah. I've been subscriber for 8 years, but since this update I will no longer pay a cent for this game. You don't respect your player base so no money from us.

MajorSnakeFox

Omg. ZOS killed ESO.

Sandman929

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

these attacks are generally made by error rather than intentionally , as they are harder to do

When you want to demonstrate right out of the gate that you don't know what you're talking about, or don't think skill should matter.

Sandman929

Looking forward to the next three updates after this to fix what you've done in 35.